Download the App

by the subway philosopher™

How many free apps do you have on your phone and computer? What’s the real price of free?

It might be more than all the dollars Bill Gates has earned from selling his operating systems. Why was Windows 10 free?

Gates found himself with two problems. The first was declining interest. In fact, XP (sp3) was probably the last great Windows OS. Everything since has been bloatware, and people know it – manufactured solutions for manufactured problems. The second problem was technological maturation. There really wasn’t that much more we wanted our computers, and then our phones, to do. It would probably take something truly revolutionary to stimulate voluntary mass-buying of the latest OS or Office – blowjobs, maybe, or Solomonic wisdom (preferably of the stock market variety).

More and more frequently these days, in order to fully partake of a friend’s social media message or post, I need to ‘download the app.’ Worse, every app asks consent to full control of my phone and all contents thereof before it will install and function correctly. This includes address book, photos, Wifi connectivity, and social media. But it’s ‘free’ though.

I remember the first feelers in this direction. A local grocery chain store asked for my phone number one day at the checkout. Fuck off, I told them. The biggest reason was that I personally knew none of the staff and none of them knew me. Disconnected, we didn’t give a shit about each other. And the purpose of the request was to grub money on behalf of a corporation, nothing else.

Progressive gun-toting metrosexual cousin-fuckers.

Software has now advanced thusly in every facet of life, from banking to ZOG and her minions, and we are at the beast’s relentless mercy. It’s no longer enough to have a smartphone; all the latest data-rape apps need be installed as well, lest we inadvertently exclude ourselves from joyous harmony with the great masses of woke humanity (not to mention social justice and progress), and become bearded moonshining metrosexual cousin-fucking progressive gun-toting wife-beating antifascist coke-snorting Trumpist egalitarian gay black Clitlonite libertarian Russian transsexual Catholic pedophiles, or something evil like that.

It’s worth pausing to contemplate the vast amounts of data swirling about in the mystical cloudosphere. All software-enabled devices are vacuuming up each and every detail of your life, bar none, and transmitting said details at your expense. That information doesn’t disappear, either. It goes somewhere and parks, forever. There are literally hundreds, if not thousands, of databases in which you are participant as a result of agreeing to share your digital device with an app or OS (or even not agreeing, a la Windows 10).

As always, it pays to ask; qui bono? Peddling big data to advertisers is apparently more lucrative than sales of products or services, and also an easier seduction – free works. However, even that market will saturate eventually. How many steaks can you eat (or afford) in a day? How many mortgages can you carry? How many videos of your girl rimming you and your best friend do they need?

One group which benefits of course is the maleficent – hackers (wait for it… the War on Hackers, coming soon once we’ve moved on from the War on Fake News). The arithmetic is obvious: hack one site once for 145,500,000 nicely organized sets of comprehensive data, or hack 145,500,000 individual people separately, multiple times. Thanks guys for accreting all this info into one convenient drive-by looting location.

Big corporations collect data, sell ads, sell contact info, sell financial data, sell all the data, and when they’ve exhausted those sources of revenue, do they say no when government comes knocking?

Divided we fall.

Big Sister of course benefits, and she probably pays for most of it too. But the joke’s on you, because that’s what ‘your tax dollars at work’ actually looks like. Did Zuckerberg say no to a fat contract with the CIA? Who got what? Who paid?

Bureaucrats have a mandate to justify their existence, and thus they beaver away at ‘programs’ to benefit humanity, and never stop thinking of new ways to do so, enabled and excited by their monopoly on coercion and violence.  The accumulation of data is a prime imperative of the do-gooder state, and included in that accumulation of data are lists and division: you’re white, or black or LGBTQ or nazi or gay or democrat, or any other label which separates you from others. Differentiation is the true nature of control. Divided we fall. Odd that Marxist egalitarians and global capitalists alike embrace it.

The US Constitution may have been an attempt to limit bureaucracy based on unbreachable principle rather than ideology, but as always ideology has won the day, and now business and bureaucrats from Australia to Zimbabwe pander to identical positions: feminism, globalism, multiculturalism, diversity, consumerism, Fukuyama’s end of history, identity politics. No alternative permitted, accusations of malevolence denied. Go online and read the major media of the world; you’ll notice the headlines and stories have the same political and ideological agenda, although occasionally the names differ.

Where does this leave us? Ideology trumps principle and reality, and when ideology has access to big data and modern state power both, how will you fare? Not well, I think.